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Life in Culebrón is a very British view of life in a small village in Alicante province, my experience of Spain, of Spaniards and sometimes of the other Britons who live nearby. The tabs beneath the header photo link to other blogs written whilst I was living in other parts of Spain, to my articles written for the now defunct TIM magazine and to my most recent photo albums.

Sunday, June 05, 2011

Catholic tastes

Yesterday it was rock bands (do they still call them that?) and today it was a brass quartet in the wine cellars of one local wineries; Bodegas Carchelo over in Jumilla.

Bit of a tour of the bodega, then a never-ending glass of wine whilst we listened to the quartet - who were seated amongst the wine barrels - doing their stuff. To be honest the verb listen probably isn't the right one as the audience was noticeably quieter during the breaks between tunes than they were whilst the quartet were playing. Concert over it was upstairs for a buffet of local delicacies with two more wines to try and then a gentle drive home.

Maggie and Chris

A little about me

Maggie and I have lived in Culebrón since early 2005. Culebrón, which means large snake of soap opera, is a strange name for a village. Spaniards snigger at the name. They think I am mispronouncing it. Culebrón is in Alicante province which means that it's a part of the larger administrative area of Valencia. Say Alicante and Spaniards think of the Mediterranean coast but we're about an hour away from the sea. In fact we're just on the border with Murcia and we are surrounded by almond and olive trees and kilometre after kilometre of vineyards. Culebrón is a very small village with a restaurant, a bodega, a village hall, a post box and not much else. The census says a hundred people live in Culebrón. I'd be surprised if there are really that many full time residents. It's one of the satellite villages of the nearby town of Pinoso. Pinoso is a nice town but, apart from the fact that it operates the largest quarry in Western Europe, it's not particularly noteworthy. But what either Pinoso or Culebrón lack in impressive buildings they make up for with a feeling of community. And Pinoso is clean, well ordered, well maintained and with a good range of services too.

We ended up in Culebrón by chance. We'd talked about moving to Spain for years. We rather fancied somewhere like Burgos or León but, once we'd actually decided to move, reality set in. We would starve to death unless we earned money. When Maggie found a job in Elche the die was cast; Alicante it was. Alicante province of course is one of the favourite destinations for expat Britons. At first we lived in a rented flat, in the coastal town of Santa Pola, and from there we searched for somewhere to buy. House prices were on the rise at the time so we had to move farther and farther from the coast to find something we could afford. The search finally led us to Culebrón.

Although we are technically in Culebrón we are not in the village centre. There are some great things about living in the countryside, like the space and being able to walk out of the front door in your pyjamas, but being five kilometres from a supermarket or a bar is not so good. Give it a few more years and it may be a real problem. We should have stuck to our original plan of finding a house in a small town.

Although we've had the house more or less from the start we haven't always lived here full time. When Maggie found work in Ciudad Rodrigo, in Salamanca, on the Portuguese border, we rented a flat there, whilst keeping the house on in Culebrón. Later we did something similar when she transferred to Cartagena in Murcia. When Maggie decided to go off to Qatar for a year I stayed behind and rented in la Unión. In fact it's only for the past three or four years that we have lived full time at home. We both have work locally now and I also travel over to Cieza in Murcia a couple of days each week for a job there.

Living in Spain is much like living anywhere in Western Europe. We go to work (though that's nowhere near as important a part of my life as it used to be), we watch telly or tinker on the Internet, we go to supermarkets and restaurants and we do the laundry. This is the place where we have our things. We get on with life.

I still find Spain remarkably interesting but I've now spent nearly 20% of my life here so it isn't as surprising as it used to be. Our inability to speak Spanish fluently and accurately is probably our biggest problem. In fact I think the lack of language shapes our lives, and the lives of lots of other, older, British immigrants here, more than most of us would care to admit.

When I started the blog the idea was simple. There were new things to talk about in a new home. In fact, because of our peregrinations, I have had four blogs all called Life in wherever the wherever being Culebrón, Ciudad Rodrigo, Cartagena and La Unión. Until July 2017 the TIM articles blog was also updated but, with the demise of the magazine, now only this one is still updated reasonably regularly. All the blogs are still available. Nowadays it is much more difficult to find new things to write about that I haven't done to death. Even so I still enjoy writing the blog. I hope you enjoy reading, at least, some of it.